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Friday 13 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Clarke, Jeremy
Pseudonym of Canadian singer, journalist and author Jeremy Samuel Gluck (1958- ), in UK from early adulthood; he has also written as by Ralph Traitor. He is of sf interest for the SKULL sequence of Near Future Satires comprising Necrotrivia vs SKULL (1989) and God Is Love: (Get It In Writing) (1990), set in an America overwhelmed by a self-created ...
Showalter, Gena
(1975- ) US author almost exclusively of paranormal romances [not listed below], mostly designed for the Young Adult market. Of sf interest is the Alien Huntress sequence beginning with Awaken Me Darkly (2005), set in a Near Future New Chicago infested by Aliens, most of them not amiable; the kick-ass protagonist, head of the police department's Alien ...
Nicholson, Geoff
(1953-2025) UK author most of whose work, often involving street-wise gonzo explorations of psyches and geographies, lies along the water margins of Fantastika; a tale like Bleeding London (1997), for instance, reads as though his unpacking of the fantasticated London at its heart represented a literal gazeteer: but, like most psychogeographies (see Iain Sinclair), it penetrates ...
Walling, William
(1926-2021) US aerospace engineer, technical writer and fiction author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Rings on her Fingers" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September 1970; further stories followed in the same magazine, in Galaxy and in Analog. In his first sf novel, No One Goes There Now (1971), a distorted human culture on a colony planet (see ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...